On July 12, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces exchanged fire along the state border in the Tovuz region of Azerbaijan and Armenia’s Tavush province, resulting in several days of intense cross-border clashes involving heavy artillery exchanges (Mod.gov.az, July 12). The two countries have been under a... MORE

On June 29, the Georgian parliament finally approved the Western-mediated electoral reform amendment to the Constitution, with 117 deputies voting in favor and 3 opposed. The passage of the amendment was made possible thanks to the votes of the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) majority and... MORE

The United States Congress may suspend around 15 percent of US financial assistance to Georgia, according to the draft Fiscal Year 2021 State and Foreign Operations Funding bill recently approved by the US House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs. The funding... MORE

At a June 2 meeting with members of the “parliament” of Abkhazia, the secessionist Georgian region’s newly elected “president,” Aslan Bzhania, reported that, during his first visit to Moscow (May 5) (Ekho Kavkaza, May 5), he had secured additional Russian funds to fill local budgetary... MORE

On June 7, Georgia kicked off a public discussion on the adoption of new constitutional amendments. This reform may prove to be the most important change to the country’s constitution since 1990, when Georgia held its first democratic multi-party elections. The proposed amendments will allow... MORE

On May 22, Armenian Health Minister Arsen Torosyan accused Georgia of hiding true statistics about the numbers of its people infected with the novel coronavirus and boasted that his country’s anti-epidemiological system was far superior to the Georgian one (Arminfo.info, May 22). His remarks sparked... MORE

Moscow’s continuing efforts to reduce the Black Sea to the status of a de facto Russian lake (see EDM, January 23) have forced Ukraine to seek increasingly inventive means of pushing back. Recently, some Ukrainian commentators have begun calling for a Timor Sea–type resolution for... MORE

*To read Part One, please click here.   While Mikheil Saakashvili served as governor of Ukraine’s Odesa Province (May 2015–November 2016), the region presented the former Georgian president with hurdles not only to system reforms but even to rational management as such. Those obstacles included:... MORE

Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has accepted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s offer to chair the Executive Committee of Ukraine’s National Council for Reforms (Ukrinform, May 7). Taking up the new challenge, Saakashvili promised to draw on the experience of his universally recognized achievements in Georgia... MORE

Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called on the Russian government to “refrain from provocative statements” and “disinformation” against the Center for Public Health Research, located near Tbilisi and named after the late United States Senator Richard Lugar (Kavkazsky Uzel, April 19). A couple weeks... MORE